waiting and doing
by Yui Miyamoto
Summary: Yuuko-san waits for someone whose wish that even she's nervous about…


**fandom - XXXHolic (with references to Tokyo Babylon and X)**  
 **title - waiting and doing**  
 **pairing - yuuko + watanuki**  
 **rating - g**  
 **description - Yuuko-san waits for someone whose wish that even she's nervous about…**

 **Disclaimer – XXXHolic, Tokyo Babylon, and X belong to Clamp. I'm just in love with their characters.**

 **waiting and doing.**  
 **By miyamoto yui**

"How can you live by drinking every single day?!" the cute, little housekeeper shouts again for the umpteenth time. I think it's more than adorable because I can't help but pull the wrong sparkplugs. He has steam come out of his ears whenever he does this.  
It makes me chuckle.

It's because I don't like to laugh. I only learned recently.

"Everyone has a vice," I say while gesturing with my finger for him to come towards me. I pull on his chin and grin as widely as I can, pretending to be drunk, but my eyes look straight at him. Looking at him so thoroughly, his body jerks as if it's been startled by a minute electrocution.  
My fingers hold onto his soft chin just a little firmer, "And it all leads to the same thing: To escape an obsessive reality."  
Flaunting his chin away, he rubs it like a brat and twitches. "Geez, Yuuko-san. Why do you always abuse me?"

I get up and walk past him. Opening the doors widely, I look at the garden and then avert my eyes towards the moonlight. Holding onto the doorway with my fingerless, leather gloves, I ask him, "If you had the responsibility of waiting or doing, what would you do, Watanuki?"

"I don't think either extreme exists. If you wait, time still moves and you've got to do something with that. And if you're doing something, you can still be waiting for something to happen." He doesn't move a step, but I know he's looking at me strangely.  
His voice tells me so.

Honesty like that can be cut away, but not ever reproduced to its original state. I envy his pureness from the world. I pity him also for not knowing how intertwined I make him to it.

I close my eyes and smile widely. "Such a wonderful answer."  
When I open my tired eyes, I sigh and lift my eyes audaciously up to the red moon. "So, that's why people affect one another's fate. That is the main trigger of why variables mix up the 'pool of life'."  
"But what-"  
I cut him off. "So, in theory, I will give more over time in equivalent for the power I've been given. But that doesn't make sense, does it?"  
I face him and look at him once more. "What do you say to a person who has a wish even you cannot predict?"

It's impossible for me to lose my powers like Hinoto-san, but it's a scary thing. Your worth in this world is as much as you can do. Even though you'd hate to admit it, it's still the basic truth.

In a second, I wink at him and laugh while reaching out my fingers to cup the right side of his face. I shake my head and tease him again. That distressed face comes back up, the one with the crimson cheeks. I push as far as I can go, but I still love to play this game with him.

Even I know that lying to this precious person is the cause of many ruins.

But this inexperienced, teenage boy still tries to attempt to answer me. "If you really knew everything, Yuuko-san, I'd…"  
He gulps and I wait for his response eagerly. "Yes, Watanuki? What would you do?"  
"I'd not come to this house."  
When I pull away from his burning face, my fingertips feel tingly. But they ache too.

He squats down to the ground to pick up my empty bottles to bring them back to the kitchen and make dinner.

I watch him as he goes down the hall and then I look up to the moon once more.

When had I begun to anticipate and become so breakable towards his answers?  
"How…childish. I'm too old for this."

 ** _*/*/*/*_**

 _"Yuuko-san~! Yuuko-san~!"_

In the middle of the night, a mother ran through my front lawn and brought her screaming child in her caring arms. I came to the threshold as my two 'children' slept in the back.  
The woman's flowery-patterned, brilliantly vibrant kimono shone against the moonlight. And the splatters of blood did not make her attire disgusting, but called a certain, delicious curiosity that made her even more beautiful.  
But it wasn't her hands that were drenched in the substance that defined human flesh, but that of her son's. He closed his eyes as if his eyes were gouged, so dark that he didn't want to see anything ever again. The fear was seeping so fast into his body as he cried that the frozen woman was shaking.

Because of her profession, she was unable to cry. It's not that she couldn't, but she sealed it away by herself.

The tranquil woman who had silently nodded her head at me years ago now frantically held her five-year-old child so closely to her bosom. How time always changes your heart and soul…

"Your son cannot be your heir in this maddened state."  
"I know and that's why I came here. Nothing I do will help this."

"No more. No more, Mommy~!" he screamed over and over.  
But she couldn't apologize. It was so deep that to utter it lost its own meaning.

I held onto his forehead but he thrashed around even more. "You want something you don't want your mother to know about."

Her emotionless eyes opened a bit wide. The hopelessness within her aura cried out to me, "But you are the one I love the most, Seishirou-san."

Without questioning me, she handed me her only son. As he cried in buckets, I closed my eyes for a split-second. Why…why was I the one given such a power? A power that doesn't grant anything, but a tangible means and momentary explanation for a mystery of life?

The more you know, it grants nothing more but insanity.

"Please stay here," I told her.

The front door closed behind me and the blood on his hands grabs onto my white, ,long-sleeved V-neck. I watched him as he wailed like a newborn. "You can't learn so fast. You have to numb yourself gradually like your mother, but she can't stand to see you in pain. Except, it isn't her wish I'm here to grant, but yours, Seishirou-san."

As I sat on the edge and swung my legs back and forth, I held him in my arms like his mother. "Seishirou-san, tell me what you want. Stop crying and tell me your deepest desire."

But what did a five-year-old know about all that? As he opened his red eyes to watch me carefully, he said, "It hurts. I watch Mommy, but it hurts here."  
He grabbed the clothing over his heart.  
"I can't take that away, child."  
"I want to make her happy, but I can't do what Mommy does. What do I do?"

I ran my fingers through his hair. "Your mother, who had given everything to have you and will continue to, is asking the same question. All I can do for you is to numb you. To deaden you."

"What does that mean?"  
"You will live like a living corpse that cannot feel anything. But this will break when you find the one you love the most in the world. Because you will become what your mother is now, all the people who touch you and those that you kill won't make any impression on you. It will come in thousands of unknown folds when the one you love most comes. All that you do will count in every second you're with that person. Do you understand?"  
"I won't feel anything until that person comes?"  
"That is right."

We looked at one another.  
He lifted up his red hands and the tears came back along with a face that wanted to scream. But he nodded his head. "Okay."  
The horror was all over him and made him quiver violently.

"For me to do this, you have to give me your mother's handkerchief." I whispered my price to him and slowly, he nodded his head.  
It was the one his mother had used to always wash her hands wipe herself when she came back home. He had stolen it from her because he held it in his hands whenever she was gone.

When I gave him back to his mother, he was sleeping. But when I handed the child back to her, she could already feel it. The one she loved was gone, given to another.  
Someone else was given in his place.

After all, it was only a matter of time.  
A hurt not realized…is it something that really unfelt?

Bowing to me, she humbly said in her strange, yet coquettish voice, "Thank you, Yuuko-san."  
Walking away with concentrated steps as if in a Noh dance, she left with Seishirou-san tightly squeezed in her arms.  
Even more firmly than when she first came.

 _ ***/*/*/***_

 _Years later, another girl-woman came to my doorstep. Before going to the guillotine held within that special sakura tree in the Sakurazuka's garden, she came to me. She left no room for time to breathe as she knelt before my feet.  
"I have no abilities that can help my brother. But if there's something that can be done about that, then I know you can do it."  
"Why should I help you, Hokuto-san?" I looked down at her.  
"You are the woman who delivered my brother and myself. My grandmother told me you and my mother had a bargain before she died, wishing for us to live as long as possible. I don't know anything more than that."  
I nodded. "But you know that you must give something just as valuable for what you're asking."  
She didn't lift up her eyes nor her head. "Please. I will do anything for Subaru."  
"Even if you're not his only one?"  
Crunching up her eyes, her prideful tears fell through her defenses and onto the ground. "Yes. That's exactly why."_

"What will you give? I cannot ask for your life." I let out a little snicker. "You'll give it to that person. Him. Or rather, both."  
She gave a comforted smile at the comment.

"I can only give you the ability to use a reverse jutsu, or rather, a mirror-ability to whomever you grant it to…" I explained it to her and she kept on lifting up her head up and down to agree to all the terms, understanding completely. "…but in exchange, you'll have to give me the necklace with the note attached. And the kiss you reserved, but won't ever give to Subaru."

Taking a deep breath, she quickly got up and took the necklace from her white sleeves. Then, she took my face and kissed me on the lips as I exchanged a small mantra from my mouth to hers. With a determined face and watery eyes, she walked away with a dignified air towards her death.

And I looked down at the locket in my hand. Opening it, there were no pictures, but a small rolled up note done under the penmanship of a four-year-old with a crayon saying,

"I'm yours and you're mine."

This was the protection charm she had used to keep her going through everything…  
…and now, her time would stop.

 ***/*/*/***

"I will be going now, Yuuko-san. If you don't need anything-Hey~!"  
I grab him from behind as Mara and Moro giggle while playing cards, ignoring us except to point and make fun of Watanuki once in a while. I laugh devilishly.

As he drags his feet out, I follow him, still holding on. I whisper into his ear, "Won't you wait with me tonight for the one I've been waiting for all this time?"  
He stops protesting. His whole body stops moving. "What are you waiting for?"  
Loudly, I pierce his ear with even more laughter to drown him even deeper in his confusion over me. I push him away. "Go home before I keep you here, Watanuki."

When he puts on his shoes at the genkan, he says without turning around, "I wish that sometimes you'd tell me what's going on."  
"Then my vice would be truly revealed."  
He pulls on his shoelaces quietly. Then, he sighs loudly. "I will stay until whomever comes to visit you tonight."  
"Then, you'll have to spend the night despite my warning."  
Taking off his shoes, he gets up and looks at me. "That's all right with me."

Walking back inside without a word, I smirk. And the wall inside of me begins to build just a little. I begin to understand what that mother, son, and sister did.  
Because I am like this, I don't know how to feel and I somehow envy humans sometimes.

But you always surprise me, Watanuki. With that ability of yours to be brave when I least expect it, when I'm sure you'll be rattled by the strangeness of my lifestyle and be disgusted with even me.

When Watanuki goes into the living room, I walk towards the front door. The white moon is high in the sky and its light guides my eyes to an almost lifeless man with a sad smile just outside my gate. He gives me a smirk as he leans on the gate with a cigarette in his hand.  
His hazel eye shines as intensely as his green one when he tries to sincerely smile at me, a sparkle of that little boy I used to watch.

"I came here to ask you something, but I decided not to anymore."

"You're not dead. You aren't helpless. And you are almost at your happiness, Subaru-san. You do not need anything from me."

He lifts up his hand to cover his glimmering, vampire eye. He shakes his head and then lets his hand go back down again. "I cannot be too selfish."  
"You never were," I answer. "If you knew true selfishness, you'd be able to come in here."  
Dropping his cigarette to the ground, he picks it up to put it into the nearest trashcan.

"Am I too afraid to take rather than to give?"  
"Maybe," I reply while shrugging my shoulders playfully.  
"Thank you. I am sorry to have bothered you." As polite as ever, isn't he?  
Lifting up his hand, he leaves.

"You are the same as you always were. Don't be ashamed of it. Compassion isn't a weakness."  
He stops and looks at the sky. "Then what is guilt?"  
"If we felt numb to the core, it didn't affect us. To feel pain and the guilt of it means that you're still trying to find a way to solve it, even if it's hopeless. The core of humanity isn't their ability to make a decision, but the strength to live with it until the end."  
He glances at me and smiles. "I wonder what you'll both do when he finds out. That boy of yours."

I shake my head. "His unpredictability is what makes him so wonderful."

Subaru nods his head. "That's why I kept this."  
He points at the gift Seishirou offered him.

"And with it, you took up all that he was and never was."

The twenty-five-year-old man is gone in a blink and I say to the mist, "That kind of love is so unconditional and pure that it cannot ever be tainted by anything, Subaru-san."

"Who are you talking to, Yuuko-san?" Watanuki asks behind me as he wraps a shawl around my shoulders. "It's super cold! Don't tell me you're immune to that too!"  
Kissing him on the forehead, I giggle as I quickly dash away from him. He shouts at me while turning redder than ever before. "YUUKO-SAN~!"

Yes, to everything else.  
Just not immune to you. That's all.

Isn't it funny that you stop time for yourself once you care for someone? That the one you want to protect isn't the one you hurt the most. It's the one you'll surely kill the closer you become. Are you strong enough for that?

Even I don't know if I am.

I take a hold of the sake and drink it straight from the bottle. It's wonderful though.  
Even if makes me anxious that my stomach turnover and I rip my own fingertips into my skin, that's one question I want to find out. It's fun when I can't figure something out. That's why I've chosen to like you, Watanuki.

Everyday has become more enjoyable because of you.

I'm sure everyone that's come here for something thinks the same when they want to protect themselves. It is for the sake of someone else's happiness. For it's not in loving someone above everything, but even more than yourself.

Because of this, your selfishness is not in wanting more time, but to keep that light in that person's eyes alive as far as you can carry it.

I look at Watanuki, who's once again at the doorway, and my lips part on their own, uncalculated more than ever. I lean my chin on my palm.

"God, I love it when you're mad."  
It means I'm within you because, deep inside, people don't get annoyed or distressed over unimportant things.

And it's not because you need something from me.

Excuse me. I'm sorry if you don't ever want to let go of me from now.  
I'm going to make sure of that.

So…in giving everything…  
…waiting and doing are exactly the same, aren't they?

Winking at you as you pout, I'm surer of it.

 **Owari.**  
 **-**  
 **author's note –** I love XXXHolic, but I got the inspiration for this from Tsubasa the anime. * shock, shock * I swear I only watched the parts with Seishirou! I was kind of annoyed how lifeless they made Sakura be in this anime (along with some other people…). I loved Sakura because she was VIBRANT, so I had to make this!

But most of all, thanks for the comments so far. They encouraged me a lot. I feel that I'm losing my touch these days, so it really meant a lot to me.

Love,  
Yui

Wednesday, December 28, 2005  
4:06:09 AM


End file.
